This is Technology Bytes, episode 186 for September 27, 2026.
Technology Bytes is a microcast where I share brief bites on interesting technology.
Enjoy, and here we go.
So this is one more week of the surprise and shine event, and this week I really want to talk about the software that Apple released.
Now, much of that was done at the WWDC earlier in the year, but they, you know, had things that they had not talked about before in this event, and I’m going to go over some of those today.
I probably won’t cover everything, but the ones that really stuck out to me, I will talk about a little bit.
Clearly, Siri AI is a big part of what Apple is doing this year, and I’ve been using it through the beta, been very impressed with it, but they’ve added a couple things that I had not heard or read or seen about.
One is the live rewind.
So if you have one of the new Apple Watches, then you can rewind the last 15 or 20 seconds and actually get a transcript of what was said.
So if you’re in a place where you can’t hear very well, or if you’re like me and you can’t hear very well anyway, then that is available to you.
The issue is that means the Apple Watch is always listening, and People don’t necessarily like that.
I like it because of my hearing condition and because of maybe some memory things, which leads me to the second thing that they’ve done, which is called recaps.
And that is where the watch is always recording, and then it can give you a recap of the event that you were at, so a meeting at work or something like that.
I was thinking even sitting through a sermon at church, and then I do a small group and having it recap that sermon for me so that I could use that when I meet with my small group to go over that sermon.
It’s really cool.
So there’s a lot of safety things in there.
Apple doesn’t actually do a recording.
It’s just, it’s saved on the watch somehow.
You know, there are a lot of things that Apple is doing.
They’ve written a lot of white papers on how it works to try to get off the this is scary, this is freaky, this is I don’t like it kind of bandwagon that happens with artificial intelligence.
Both options I like.
I understand the problem with always-on recording, but I would get a new Apple Watch just for these two things, and I’m hoping they come out.
They’re not out yet.
They’ll come out in maybe another couple weeks or a month.
The other thing that Apple did is revamped their health app.
And so there are things that come to my current version of phone and watches, and they’re really cool.
And I’ve been looking at them, kind of a health age and insights into your health.
I don’t sleep well, so that adds to, you know, what it thinks of my physical age.
But I exercise quite a bit.
I try to eat fairly well, and so that decreases my age.
You know, I did a little insight and age thing on the new health app in the beta, and it put me at six years younger physically than I am actually.
And so that always makes you feel kind of good, but— Who knows if it’s real or not.
The other thing that they’ve added is a readiness score, which says, based on your current conditions of heart rates and sleep times and those kind of things, how ready are you to attack the day, to go to a workout.
And it comes up and says, hey, you might want to take it a little bit easy today because of whatever.
And then they have put new sensors in the watches that are reading on a more continual basis.
You know, the current heart rate reads every, I don’t know, five minutes or something like that, and this one reads every five seconds.
I don’t know what it does to the battery, but they’ve also improved the Vitals app that tracks those health things and gives you insights into those, and a lot of cool health functions that they have added.
Some are not immediately available.
They’ve got things on the phone that you can sit it up against a wall and it can record you while you do certain things, kind of to give you an idea of your current physical health, and just some really cool things in the Health app.
I use the watch a lot for health activity and tracking, and this really grabs my interest as well.
The other thing they did on the watch is what is called the Dynamic App Grid.
And so when you double-click the crown to open an app, it gives you Siri AI in the middle, and then it gives you, like, I think it’s five apps around it, and it chooses what it thinks you need to have available at the time.
And it really does a good job.
When I need to open an app, when I double-click the digital crown, it provides a list of apps—not list, it’s in a grid—and whatever app I want at the time is on that grid.
And so I think it really does a good job at looking at what you use, when you use, and have that available to you so you don’t have to go through your entire grid of all the apps that are open or that are installed on your watch.
A couple other things they’ve done.
They’ve done some photo upgrades, improved the way you can edit your photo, taking things out, readjusting the angle of the picture, expanding it so that it can fill a better framing kind of thing.
So a lot of cool photo upgrades through artificial intelligence or machine learning.
They’ve done a lot of Safari upgrades.
You can go on a website and have it notify you of something that changes on there.
Oftentimes that would be pricing on a given item or something you’re looking at.
You can write your own extensions.
I don’t use any extensions for Safari, so I haven’t looked into that one too much.
But beyond all the cool things that they’ve done to upgrade all the 27 versions of the operating systems, and I’m not really going to go into that.
These are just a highlight of a few of the things that they’ve done.
The one that grabs my attention the most is the health advantages from the new watches and the Siri AI advantages on the new watches, and it really makes me want to buy both new watches, the Ultra 4 and the Apple Watch 12, because I’m a two-watch person.
So I’m really looking at that, trying to decide what to do and what can I afford, and yeah, we’ll see what happens.
But obviously I’ll talk about it here if any of my hardware changes.
That is all I have for today.
If you have comments, suggestions, or questions, you can send them to technologybytes@merrickfamily.com.
As always, I want to thank you for listening to the Technology Bytes Microcast, and I look forward to the next time we are together taking another bite of technology.
